Another Freedom Summer

During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growing political split on the question of Palestine between a more diverse and engaged younger population and an older generation reared on the long-standing tropes of Israel’s discourse. Drawing analogies between this paradigm shift and the turning point in the civil rights movement enshrined in Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer, author and scholar Robin Kelley goes on to ask whether the outrage of the summer of 2014 can be galvanized to transform official U.S. policy.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of U.S. History at UCLA and author of several books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), and Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). His research has explored the history of social movements in the United States, the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music and visual culture; and contemporary urban studies, among other topics.